youth

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

I do mistakes. You do mistakes. Still we end up with a warm hug. That's you. That's me.

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit."If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

Of course the activists__ot those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic__ad long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society__ atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society__ values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words__ords are for __ypeheads,_ Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips__heir only proficient vocabulary is in the society__ platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one__ self depends upon one__ mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from __ broken home._ They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

He listens when I talk.

Sister, why do you do that?""Do what?""Cage the animals at night?""Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.""But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?""Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together.

[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)

Appreciate youthful exuberance.

Age is only a number. Keep an active life.

Children are lovable and adorable.

Youthful strength is a great blessing.

Do all the work you can in your youthful days while you have the greatest strength.

The adult age begins with the blessed single strand of a grey hair.

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and __ransformed_ her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

You were the hardest year of my life and I__e never been so happy. What does that say about me?

When I was a child, I thought like a child.When I became adult, I seek a deeper understanding of life.